Giving Legs to Handprint Thinking: Foundations for Evaluating the Good We Do

In environmental management and sustainability there is an increasing interest inmeasurement and accounting of benecial impact—as an incentive to action, as a communication tool,and to move toward a positive, constructive approach focused on opportunities rather than problems. Oneapproach uses the metaphor of a “handprint,” complementing the notion of environmental footprints,which have been widely adopted for impact measurement and accounting. We analyze this idea byestablishing core principles of handprint thinking: Handprint encourages actions with positive impacts andconnects to analyses of footprint reductions but adds value to them and addresses the issue of what actionshould be taken. We also identify ve key questions that need to be addressed and decisions that need to bemade in performing a (potentially quantitative) handprint assessment, related to scoping of theimprovement to be made, how it is achieved, and how credit is assigned, taking into account constraints onaction. A case study of the potential water footprint reduction of an average Finn demonstrates howhandprint thinking can be a natural extension of footprint reduction analyses. We nd that there is adiversity of possible handprint assessments that have the potential to encourage doing good. Their commonfoundation is “handprint thinking.”202